Life with Mr. Sagan, after homeroom and before gym

I did something today that I haven't done since high school . . . I lounged around my house on a Sunday and did homework, or the "homeworkiest" stuff that I have to do (i.e. find a job, network, call people, start researching again dot dot dot).  It was pretty cool. I felt like I was well, back in high school, only this time I wasn't pretending to study for the SAT.  I thought some thoughts, wrote down some stuff, typed lots of emails and mostly stared out my window which overlooks Berkeley and Angel Island.

When I first graduated all I wanted to do was stare at the stars. For some reason, I couldn't see nearly enough stars out on the east coast.  Maybe it was because it rained (or was overcast) for the last two weeks I was at Wesleyan in Connecticut.  At home, I can see many more stars and often find myself looking up at the sky when I park my car at night and walk to my front door.  It is comforting.  I can usually hear a distant fog horn too.

The following clip below is called "Cosmos."  It's a real humdinger of PBS or NOVA or whatever 90's hell they showed us on Sunday nights.  Finding this video reminded me of this particular night in fourth grade when a space expert came to our colorful classroom.  We sat there with our parents and learned about the stars from this guy that clearly was not so stoked to be talking to fourth graders about the universe - we asked no question he hadn't heard before, "not so good for my research," he probably thought.

He showed us this chart of "the aging process" of the Sun.  He told us that "one day the Sun with get very hot and will get bigger, and then it will explode."  That is a huge thing to tell someone young and wide-eyed: "you know that thing in the sky that they tell you not to look directly at and makes you a slave to sunscreen? well, it's going to explode."  I remember, though, that instead of feeling fearful of the cataclysmic end, all I could think about was how awesome stars are.

We later went outside to the blacktop painted with white lines for recess games and looked through his fancy telescope at Saturn's rings and had cookies that the teacher baked earlier that evening.  Thoroughly pleased with my Tiburon public school education, my parents escorted me home in my dad's Toyota 4-Runner and drove along Tiburon Boulevard at an hour way too late for my little, size-4 shoe.  I was the second-tallest girl in the class.